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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

new craiglist nigerian scamer

[Update: This one is amazing! They must send so many emails to so may people they dont even remember who they send emails to. This particular one, asked me again about the same item a week later from a somewhat different email address. Perhaps webmail companies, should consider limiting the access of their services for individuals in Nigeria.]

This scammer from Craigslist was a little bit different than the others.

He send me an email asking if the item is still for sale and when I immediately replied him, he added me in the Yahoo messenger and commenced chatting with me about his "interest" on the product!

Never had such experience before. But the rest was the same as the other Nigerian scammers and he wanted to pay via paypal.

24 comments:

I appreciate your post today about the above address. A customer requested I ship an iPhone to the exact address mentioned above.

Can you provide more details on how the scammers tend to scam people? For example, the person sent the money into my PayPal account and requested I send it to the address. If I do send it, what happens next? How do they scam people?

Hello Hussam,if you check the link somewhere on the top right "Scam How to:" you will have your answer.

As far as I know since I have not seen what they actually send you the payment is not real. It is just a fake paypal email they send in your paypal email address. You always have to check your paypal balance. And do not send them paypal money requests.Now if they have become better and deposit actual funds in your paypal account, I had not such "luck" so far.If this is the case I would imagine that after you send and confirm posting the item, or after they receive it they would ask for their credit card company to withdraw the money anf paypal would have to comply, or alternatively they use a fake credit card or a stolen credit card (they are sold cheaply online) and well after the bank or the owner realizes the problem you are out of money and the item you were selling.

That is all I can say for now without knowing your exact situation. If I had more money I would block the nigerian IP addresses that frequently visit the blog and get updated

Thank you for your time and efforts explaining the types of online frauds. I would just like to inform other users who are visiting this blog that the above addresses are confirmed to be operated by scam artists. When I sent amyrose416@aol.com an e-mail informing her about this blog, she accused the blog owner of this blog for ripping her off. I replied back requesting a copy of her passport or drivers license in which she agreed to and sent me a passport picture. When I opened the passport picture, I realized the photo was a sample photo of a UK British passport. I sent another e-mail informing her that it was a sample photo of a passport and not her own and if she can send me a photocopy of her passport from inside. Since today (a couple of months now) I have received no reply.

How this scam works is simple. They basically send you a "fake" e-mail and the e-mail says it's from PayPal when in fact it is not. The e-mail informs the user that the funds have been funded into the user's paypal account when in fact nothing has really been transferred.

A note to everybody: Before buying an item online, research their e-mail addresses used for communication and their address or addresses to make sure no one else has been scammed with the buyer before. Also please check with your bank/paypal or whatever online buying system you are using, that your account has been funded.

I want to personally thank Nicholas for creating this scam-awareness blog as I was very close to being scammed, but thanks to this blog I was not.

The following email address is also being used by an "Eileen Flemming" in NORWAY. tentebo3@hotmail.no. Same process outlined above.

They also used a second email, however, which claimed that "PayPal" had accidentally taken too much money from Eileen Flemming's account, and that you must wire money to an account (via Western Union) in Nigeria to cover the over-draft. Upon confirmation of the money wire, "PayPal" would then release the total amount of money into my PayPal account.

None of this information appeared in my secure PayPal account, however, leading me to call the official PayPal security personnel and report the scam.

Thank you Nicholas, and everyone else who have commented here. I recieved a response to a Norwegian ad, on a page similar to Ebay (just a norwegian version) from Eileen Fleming. I was thrilled that someone responded so quickly and wanted to buy all the items I wished to sell (old windows-games). However, she did not want me to send the games to her, but to this address:

Emmanuel AyoadeNo.5 Small LondonIREEOsun StateNigeria

She told me this was her son. I thought it was a bit strange that a woman, wanted to buy these kind of games for her son, which obviously didn´t live at home and seemed too old to have an interest in these games. When I asked her where she lived she told me she was from Denmark, which would explain how she, who spoke english, could understand a norwegian ad.

What I could not find here, is that I actually recieved an email from paypal where it said " This is a confirmation email of a payment of kr(...) received from Eileen Fleming, what is required from you in other for your account to be credited is the item's tracking/reference number, this number will be given to you at the post office after you(...)"

Something else, which I didn´t notice until now. I don´t know if this will be usefull to anyone else, but it might, so I´ll post it. I have gmail, and by comparing the details from the paypal email (confirming the tracking number, from eileen) and an old paypal email I recieved, I found something that might be useful.

I F****** KNEW IT!!! Thank you so much..... I got scammed too today. Almost! But thanks to you, I wount pay down the money. Oh my God, I really want to kill someone right now. Hahaha :) How a nice day, and again - THANK YOU!! <3 Love from Norway

Eileen Flemming, does that sound like someone you guys "know" too??? Ahhh.. Almost got fucked up by a criminal bastard. Shit, Im so pissed right now. But still glad, cuz I googled her "email"adress, and came to this site. Nice Man!!

Stay safe.. Im so naiv, so I would also like to say: Stay sceptic!! Beacuse I was gonna sell our KTM motorcyckle, for 70.000, to a agent in Nigeria. BAH!!! I have wasted to hours writing with here on my mail chat at googletalk.

So, here's what happens if you're as stupid as I am and actually send the stuff. Paid a lot for the postage to Nigeria, got the tracking and sent it to the email address they named... 1 minute later this popped up in my inbox:

We have received the tracking number as prove of shipment and we have verified. We wanted to credit your account before we detected that the buyer made an overpayment of 4,300.00 NOK instead of 1,300.00 NOK into your account and we have deducted the money from his account.

So all you have to do to get your account credited is to send the sum of 3,000.00 NOK to the recipient's new address provided for you by PayPal and send the funds via Western Union Money Transfer and get back to us with the details or the Scanned receipt as proof of transaction so that we can verify and credit your account.

Hi Solvi, I am sorry to hear that you fall a victim of them. I don't know if you would be able to reclaim the package from your local post office before it leaves for some distribution center. In Greece might be possible depending on your speed back to the post office and the level of personal relationship you built with the workers there. In the UK and elsewhere I am not so sure. And yes it is known that they also make this "overpayment" scam with fake paypal emails, however I do not think that paypal can do much to stop them. And because they use Western Union and not paypal to receive the money, if you make the mistake to send it, you can't claim it back. Or at least that is the story, since I have never really test it to the end. They do ask for a scanned copy of the receipt in Western Union although I am not sure why they need it.

I've said it before and I will say it again. Doing online business with Nigerian "buyers" is 99.9999999999% fraud. Spread the word and keep people safe.

Thank you for sharing the information with the blog. It helps to keep it updated.It also helps to share the email addresses they use. If you want read the comment here

Make sure not to reveal your real details. I do not know how successful they are in this "business" but from email contact I had with many of them I know for a fact that if you keep details scarce they never know who they talk with and for which product cause they send such a big amount of fake emails to many online ads. However since they managed to scam you, they will probably know more for you than you would like. For example if they only had 1 victim in NOK and they receive an envelope from NOK trying to rip them off, they might suspect it comes from you.

Nigerian Scams

Nigerian Scams p1

Nigerian Scams p2

Nigerian Scam p3

Nigerian (mostly) Scammers

This Blog is dedicated to making public the details of people who tried to scam me into posting items, sold through the internet, usually by sending fake paypal payments.99% of the times they ask to send stuff in NIGERIA.1 Major one is from Malaysia and has a long online scamming history using similar names-emails.So everyone with a simple search can see if they are dealing with the bad apples.I wonder if they study these things in the university...

Apologies

I decided to post some fake ads to attract the attention of scammers. So I feel the need to apologise to all those legitimate online shoppers who may stumble on my ads.